


those who don't dream at all

by digital



Series: the commander [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: (this is set in the gw2 universe i just didn't want it in the tag), Multi, anyway here's my feral boy, i also haven't written anything with the intention of finishing it for literal years, so quality is compromised, this is just my commander's story and probably won't be of interest to you
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2021-01-29 20:43:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21416386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/digital/pseuds/digital
Summary: Somewhere deep inside itself, the jungle was waking up.
Series: the commander [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1559800
Kudos: 3





	1. between the trees

The movement within the Pact camp settles as the sun begins to rise. Insects and small animals that call the night their home retreat to their burrows, and sentries and soldiers and chopper pilots retreat to their tents, and the surrounding jungle falls under a blanket-like hush. The airship, which crashed weeks ago but only stopped smoking within the last few days, begins to throw its shadow upon the bivouac beneath it. From above, the jungle is cut with well-walked paths, made by the native population and encouraged by the temporary one, but now stalked by enemies and predators who have learned to predict their prey’s behaviours. As the light in the sky brightens, they retreat to the trees to sleep or lurk in the concealing shadows.

Felwen is on morning duty today. She doesn’t need anyone to wake her - the canvas of her communal tent is thin, and just the feeling of the sunlight reaching through to warm her skin is enough to wake her, but by no means does she feel well rested. None of the survivors do, and some of them are beginning to envy the non-survivors because of it. The night is loud, the bedrolls are uncomfortable. And, as a sylvari, her energy relies partially on what sunlight she manages to receive – but between being stationed down in the gullies of Verdant Brink, and being on patrol for the night defence, she isn’t getting as much as she’d like.

The camp has received advance notice that the Commander intends to pay them a visit today, or in the coming days. With the jungle being so unpredictable in its navigation, punctuality is no longer expected of anyone, not even the Pact’s leader. Felwen, a Vigil recruit, and now - she supposes - a member of the Pact, has been chosen, amongst others, to await his arrival by the perimeter. And, in the case that he _doesn’t _arrive in the next few days, assemble a search party – whether they be searching for the Commander or his body.

“Did much happen last night?” she asks her norn friend, Jorund, as their paths converge on the way to the camp’s entrance. As the casualties climb in number, the camp has driven a need for some of its members to pull double shifts simply to break even, simply to make it through the night without the camp being overrun. And Jorund looks every inch as tired as he must feel. Felwen watches him empty a waterskin and latch it back onto his belt, taking his axe in one hand. 

“Nope, another quiet one,” he grunts. “Makes me wonder what they’re doing, if they’re moving somewhere else. Maybe there’s something more important for them to do.”

Not for the first time since waking up, Felwen finds herself worrying about the Commander. She’s never met him, but she knows the Pact is in dire straits, and that he may be their last chance to get out of this jungle alive. But even the dragon killer himself can’t fend off a whole continent’s worth of Mordrem. “Maybe we’re just doing a good job of fighting back,” she responds, with a weak laugh. Both of them know that’s not true.

They come to a stop near a gap in the electrified perimeter fence, and stand beside it in silence for some time. It’s not awkward - they just don’t have much left to say. Nobody does. Some people wasted their energy trying to make idle conversation, but even they gave up after a few days. Jorund runs his calloused thumb across the blade of his axe, duller now than it had been when they crashed, and Felwen’s eyes unfocus and settle on the darkness of the treeline, waiting for a reason to do her job - until she sees something. 

Lights. Two small, white lights, looking back at her from behind a tree.

She nudges Jorund with her foot. “Do you see that?”

A few moments pass as Jorund cranes his neck, trying to see what she’s looking at, and she eventually feels him tense up beside her. He straightens to his full 9-foot-height, adjusting his grip on his axe. “I see it.”

Felwen knows what he’s thinking. “It’s not Mordrem. Their eyes are orange.” She looks back into the treeline to see the lights haven’t moved. They’re definitely eyes - Felwen feels an uncomfortable crawling sensation down her spine, the feeling of being closely watched - and the more her eyes adjust to the darkness she’s staring into, she notices other lights. Pale pink strips, thin and glowing less brightly than the eyes, wrapped around what must be the body of whatever’s looking back at them. A quiet gasp escapes her, and she grabs Jorund’s wrist.

“It’s a sylvari. It’s a _sylvari, _Jorund.”

“Then let’s go talk to it,” Jorund growls, and breaks from Felwen’s grasp to push through the entry point, striding towards their observer. “If it doesn’t mean any harm then we won’t have a problem, will we?” Felwen has no choice but to follow, drawing her staff from its place on her back despite her doubt that this person means them any harm. Jorund easily outpaces her at a walk and makes it to the place where the thick undergrowth starts a good few seconds before she can catch up.

“What’s going on?” he calls towards the eyes. They don’t falter, just maintain their unblinking stare. “Get out here.” 

Felwen gives his orders a few seconds’ worth of chance, before removing her outer robes - the length of the things don’t lend well to trudging through brambles - and takes another step forward. As the sun gets blocked out from her vision, she adapts even more to the darkness, and can more easily make out the silhouetted figure maybe ten yards ahead of her. It is, as she had thought, a sylvari. His eyes have dark sclera, with pinprick, frightened-looking white pupils, and his thick bark-like carapace exhibit deep ridges through which his luminescent sap shows. He’s crouching in the brush, and lowers his stance even further as Felwen gets closer. 

“It’s okay, it’s alright.” She gives Jorund a disarming glance as she moves further forward. The sylvari, she notes, is stark naked, and she notes some of the glowing pink liquid pooling underneath him, dripping down from one arm which is held limply at his side. As the eyes continue to show no signs of recognition, she finds her voice assuming the tone of someone comforting a frightened wild animal. “We’re good guys. Why don’t you come back with us to camp and we can get that arm looked at?”

Close enough to touch him now, Felwen crouches down, reaching his eye level and extending a hand. Though she expected the strange sylvari to flinch away at her touch, he remains completely still, only the slow flowing of his sap giving evidence that he’s not made of stone. Her hand moves to apply a gentle grip to his uninjured shoulder, and to her relief, she finds that as she slowly stands, he stands too. Sylvari aren’t particularly warm, not in the way that humans are, but she notices how cold this one feels under her hand - maybe, she thinks, just as a result of being out here all night.

Then she wonders - how on earth would an unarmed sylvari survive the night attacks on their own?

Pushing that question to the back of her head, Felwen begins to walk slowly back towards the path, occasionally glancing behind her to check the sylvari is following her; and, to her relief he is. She notices a slight limp in his gait, but otherwise he seems able to walk. It’s only a short way to the medic tent just inside the perimeter fence, and failing all else, Jorund can carry him there. 

Felwen ignores Jorund’s questioning looks as she escapes the undergrowth, standing by his side while she waits for the stranger to reach them. As he steps out into the sun, he flinches slightly, but seems to adjust quickly to the light - looking briefly up into the bright sky beneath the shade of one hand. 

“Are you okay to follow us back to camp? We can get you looked at there.”

“And then get you some clothes,” Jorund adds, though he’s looking at Felwen, as if this is her fault. She ignores him in favour of observing the sylvari’s response - and he just looks at her as if she hadn’t said anything at all. Even in the event that he just didn’t understand what she was saying, Felwen feels she would get _some _reaction out of him. But there’s nothing behind his eyes, and that nothingness gives her a chill, separate from the previous feeling of being watched.

Despite the limp, the sylvari follows them well. For some reason, Felwen, after this first impression, had begun to expect him to walk like some sort of bipedal animal, like the raptors she’s seen stalking the jungle in their predatory packs - all hunched over and ready to fight or flee. But he walked like she did, like Jorund did, like every other person in the camp did, quickly-gained trust seeming to override most of the fear he had exhibited a few moments ago. He doesn’t look around at his surroundings, and barely even looks where he’s going – he just stares at the norn and sylvari walking ahead of him, leading the way.

The medic tent is unattended when they arrive, though most of the supplies remain in the crates scattered around the interior. Felwen spends a few minutes rifling through them - most first aid supplies the camp possesses is best used on meat-based organisms, as in not-sylvari, especially with the...difficulties sylvari have been having with the rest of the camp, but in a pinch they’ll do.

“And how do you think the others are going to react to this?”

Felwen is too busy tearing open a sachet of salve with her teeth to dignify Jorund with a response. He sidles around to enter her field of vision - he has to slouch slightly when he stands at the edge of a tent to avoid having his head touch the ceiling - and continues once he’s satisfied it’ll be harder for her to ignore him. “You really think you’re going to get away with bringing some strange sylvari in? With the way everyone already feels?”

Feeling her gut wrench slightly at his words, she tries to occupy herself with wiping as much sap as possible away from the stranger’s shoulder. There are three puncture wounds in the bark, which is thick - made by something with very long, sharp teeth, which isn’t at all surprising to her at this point. Either way, the sylvari hasn’t made a peep since she started treating him, and she appreciates the unvoiced faith in her somewhat shaky first aid skills. But once she’s done, once it’s cleaned up, her mind wanders to the rumours she’s heard from other camps, and the rising antagonism she’s experiencing in this one. People are afraid of sylvari now, and that fear manifests as anger. What if this sylvari was exiled? What if some of her fellow soldiers, survivors of another crash, deemed him a threat and let the jungle have its way with him? What if, sometime soon, that will happen to her?

“I can only hope everyone’s _feelings _change soon. Otherwise…” She pauses long enough to apply some pressure to the shoulder, bringing the sylvari’s other hand up and placing it on the compress. He seems to get the message and holds it there as Felwen prepares a bandage, before she can address what looks like deep claw marks in one of their thighs. Felwen shakes her head, not wanting to finish her thought. “I doubt this one is going to do us any harm.”

“You never know.” Looking up, Felwen notices the sternness with which Jorund is looking at her. “Dragons are tricksy.”

She quickly diverts her attention back to the bandages, and outside, more survivors are waking up to make their morning patrols.

* * *

A few hours later, the Commander arrives; Kegan, a stern-looking sylvari with broad shoulders and the same charcoal coloured carapace as that of the stranger they'd found in the jungle, harsh red sap showing through his cracks – though despite his appearance, he seems rattled, and almost afraid as the rest of them. He’s flanked by only two people - Canach, who Felwen has seen around, and a charr she doesn’t recognise, with ram-like horns and a pale red pelt, matted in places by mud and blood and gods know what else. She doesn’t speak to Kegan directly, but she’s glad to see him in one piece, if not seemingly deflated. Secondhand, she hears word of the disappearance of a few high-ranking Pact members, including a couple from the legendary Destiny’s Edge, and she lets the sadness distract her for an hour or two. 

She really hopes their only chance doesn’t get torn to shreds by the jungle.

She and Jorund had returned to their patrols, after they had led the patched-up sylvari back to Felwen’s empty tent and supplied him with some spare clothes. She had taken to calling him Ethryd, an old name that meant _unfamiliar, _and it had quickly stuck - though Ethryd still didn’t respond to anything she said to him. She dedicates some time to wondering where he came from - if he doesn’t understand her, could he possibly be from the same Pale Tree that she was, that every other sylvari she knew was? How did he end up, naked, alone in the middle of the jungle, and how had he not been claimed by the night?

Jorund returns from the temporary mess tent as the sun starts to climb down from the sky, and tosses Felwyn a small tin of rations. She peels the lid open and digs in with her hands - the two of them, stationed once again by the same gap in the perimeter fence, eat in silence for a few minutes.

When a commotion sparks up a few tents away, Jorund raises his head. When there’s gunfire, Felwyn raises hers, too.

They don’t even exchange a glance before dropping their meals and springing to their feet, weapons in hand, and half-jogging towards the source of the noise. In the moment, Felwyn just thinks the night attacks are starting early. She makes out some of the words being said now, barked out at an unseen victim. 

“Who the _fuck _are you and why are you here?”

The two of them turn the corner just in time to see a well-dressed human being gently pulled away by a charr. Felwen recognises both of them - the human is Jean Damon, a hot-tempered ex Seraph, and the charr is Valdiez, a gentle engineer and (fortunately) the only one in the camp capable of talking Damon down from a murderous ledge. 

And standing, like a deer in headlights in front of the pair, is Ethryd, holding a small branch in what seems to be a defensive manner. 

Jorund motions at Felwen to walk away - maybe he’s worried she’ll be blamed for leading this stranger back to their camp. Maybe he’s worried she’ll be turfed out because of it. Felwen only cares about that for a very short moment, instead stepping authoritatively forward and catching the eye of Valdiez, who seems to be the only member of the altercation to have noticed them.

“He’s a survivor,” she says, choosing her words carefully. Valdiez hasn’t managed to pry the pistol from Jean’s hand yet, and the human isn’t known for his sterling trigger discipline. “Like us. We found him just outside camp this morning. We think he’s from Mellagan’s Valor, but he’s in shock. He won’t talk.”

That wasn’t enough for Damon, seemingly, as he whips around to look at her. “I’m sorry - did you have any proof that this _thing _isn’t just some Mordrem spy?”

“Bandits only took _one _of your eyes, Damon, don’t act like you’re blind. Does he _look _Mordrem to you?” _Brave, _Felwen thinks to herself, immediately regretting her words. She takes a step back as Damon turns on her, fists still gripped at his sides. Felwen hears the beginning of a snarl rumble in the back of his throat, and his shoulders tense - but all Valdiez has to do is brush against his arm with a clawed hand and the tension disappears. Behind him, Ethryd looks like he’s about to bolt. Felwen mouths the word _don’t _at him, as if it will make any difference, but he stays put for now.

“We’ve got a patrol to get to. It’s been nice talking to you,” Valdiez says slowly, almost like he’s trying to hypnotise Damon. Though Felwen doubts that’s what he’s doing, it seems to work - Damon looks up at the charr and seems to simmer down a little further, though he spits on the ground in frustration before he’s eventually coaxed away.

Felwen’s eyes follow the pair until they turn a corner and disappear out of sight. Once they’re gone, she strides forward, crouching in front of Ethryd and touching his wrist. “Are you okay? Did they hurt you? Look, look at me - it’s me. It’s okay.” Jorund listens to her babble miscellaneous words of comfort towards the sylvari, but he’s watching Ethryd’s face.

For the first time, his eyes seem to focus and he looks directly down at Felwen. And a frown tightens the gaps between the bark that forms his brows.

And he speaks, the sound stumbling from his throat as though his vocal chords were rusted machines left unused for decades.

“Shut up.”


	2. the pact encampment

The second thing Ethryd told Felwen to do was _stop calling me that, what kind of name is that, _and it subsequently came out that his name was, in fact, Oleraco. Which Felwen thought was just as strange a name as Oleraco obviously thought Ethryd was, but she decided not to pick this particular battle. He didn’t object when Jorund suggested they all go back to their tent and talk this out where prying eyes couldn’t see - Damon is an extreme, for sure, but Felwen doubted the officers would be okay with them dragging an unknown sylvari in.

On the walk back Felwen notices Oleraco’s limp is gone. And then she notices the fact that he’s wearing different clothes to the ones they gave him earlier - his previous outfit had been some simple human townclothes that didn’t offer much in the way of protection, but did the job. Now he’s wearing what looks more like leather armour, dark in colour and fitting him much more accurately. But she doesn’t say anything. She has enough questions to ask him as it is.

There’s one person in the tent when they get back - Azari Mensah, who sits in silence and eats her meal and only seems to watch the three of them when they aren’t watching her. Felwen knows that she won’t tell anyone.

Regardless, she keeps her voice low. “What were you doing out there?” 

“Would you believe me if I said I had no idea?”

The answer is no at first, but Felwen thinks about it. He could have been hurt in the crash. Maybe another airship went down near them in the last couple of days - no way could he survive out there for any longer than that. Mellagan’s Valor crashed weeks ago, the same time Felwen’s ship, Glory of Tyria, did. 

“Do you mean you don’t remember?”

“Hit your head or something?” Jorund interjects. Oleraco maintains a familiar unblinking, unrecognising stare with him for a few moments before shaking his head. 

“I don’t know. The first thing I remember is waking up out there, and this...giant...thing came running at me.”

Felwen cranes her neck towards him. “Did it look reptilian? Those tooth marks looked saurian to me,” she asks, as if identifying his attacker in a jungle full of potential attackers is the most important matter at hand. Jorund picks up on something more important before Oleraco has the chance to answer her.

“Do you remember the Pale Tree?”

“What’s that?”

Jorund and Felwen exchange a look. Felwen can’t help but notice Azari has finished her meal and is brazenly watching them from across the tent now. 

“All sylvari,” she starts carefully, fingers nervously tapping at a ridge in the wood of her staff, “well, all the sylvari I know are born of the Pale Tree. She shows us all we need to know in the Dream, and then she brings us into the world.”

It’s clear Oleraco has no idea what she’s talking about. Felwen wonders briefly if he’s hungry, but he hasn’t complained, and she gets the feeling that he _would _have complained by now if he were. She knows that talking at him isn’t going to suddenly jog his memory, if he even has the memory at all. Though Felwen never met him, she heard talk of a sylvari being found that wasn’t from the Pale Tree at all, but from another one, another propagator of their kind out there in some unknown place.

Maybe that place was the jungle. Maybe Oleraco was from there too.

“Maybe you hit your head.” Felwen echoes Jorund’s earlier theory as she recognises that Oleraco isn’t going to respond. And he doesn’t disagree with that. He bunches his knees up to his chest, looking slightly less alien in his mannerisms by the minute.

“That’s possible.”

Felwen feels her anxious expression soften and disappear, and Jorund sits on the floor next to her. She can feel his gaze on the side of her face, and she knows he’s trying to tell her something, but right now she doesn’t want to know what it is, given that he’s probably just going to try and suggest Oleraco is some kind of Mordrem spy. She doesn’t know how she’s so certain that that isn’t the case - she hasn’t been out here long, and she hasn’t had many interactions with Modrem beyond seeing them stalking the outskirts of the camp when dusk falls. The only thing brave enough to make its way inside the camp are the writhing, whiplike vine tendrils that erupt from the ground at night. She hasn’t even heard the dragon’s voice in the way other sylvari have claimed to, hasn’t felt any pull towards the dark side.

But she knows this one means them no harm.

There’s a pause, during which Azari leaves the tent. Felwen turns to rifle through a crate next to her. She took out three brown bags that seemed to be made of some sort of leather, tossed one to Oleraco, and placed the other in Jorund’s lap. “Water,” she says, catching Oleraco’s curious look. 

A group of people walk past the tent’s entrance, their silhouettes cast on the canvas by the sunlight behind them. They seem to be having a loud and heated argument, and Oleraco turns to listen carefully to it as their voices fade away. The sun’s illuminating effect on the canvas of the tent is quickly diminishing as it sets. Jorund, who has definitely been awake for over 24 hours at this point, stands up.

“He staying here with you?”

“I guess so,” Felwen responds, checking Oleraco’s face for objections. “He can...he can have Rois’ bedroll.” 

Oleraco doesn’t have to know much about his surroundings to guess why Rois doesn’t need that bedroll anymore. Either way, it’s a bed in a tent, neighboured by people armed and willing to fight away whatever the jungle has to throw at them, so he can’t complain. Jorund hands Felwen his empty water skin and leaves the tent. The two sylvari watch the silhouette cast on the canvas depart until it can’t be seen.

Felwen looks at him closely now, as though she’s looking at a fellow sylvari instead of a wild animal. His new armour is only just darker than his charcoal-coloured bark, and comprised of tightly-wrapped, woody vines. Perhaps, she thinks, he grew it himself – an ability sylvari are known to have, but a process that usually takes several days, not two hours. His face is what she would describe as _fierce, _with narrowed eyes – having lost their glow in the light, they’re now a pale pink colour, with a thin, catlike pupil – and lines of luminous sap highlighting the contour of his cheekbones and drawing short stripes above his mouth, giving him an almost skull-like appearance. His hair is long leaves, loose and almost wild. He looks familiar, but at the same time, like nothing she’s ever seen before.

“I don’t know how I’d live not having dreamed,” she says, breaking the brief silence.

“I think I’m okay with it.” Oleraco pretends not to notice how carefully Felwen watches him when he speaks. “It’s not like I’ve ever known any different. I haven’t lost anything.” 

Felwen seems to make a conscious effort to wipe the sad look from her face, then changes the subject. “I hope we get home soon. I’d really like to introduce you to the Pale Tree, and see if she knows anything about you.”

“Home?”

“Yes. I’m not from here. None of us are.” 

“Then why are you here?”

Felwen pauses, perhaps taking the question in a more existential way than had been intended. She wastes a few beats looking down at her palms. “I’m a member of an organisation called the Vigil - well, I suppose I’m a member of The Pact now. We came here to help with defending Tyria against the Elder Dragon that recently woke up here. Our airships were attacked. Our whole fleet was downed. I don’t think there’s many of us left alive, but all we can really do is keep fighting back until someone figures out a way to save us.”

“What’s an Elder-”

Oleraco was interrupted by someone else entering the tent. A large figure, as tall as Jorund had been, but broader, not to mention covered in fur. A charr, he knew that by now, and one he recognised to boot – his nerves settled as he recognised the charr that had defended him earlier. Felwen, with her back to the tent’s entrance, had to turn around to address him.

“Valdiez? Where’s Jean?”

A snort escaped Valdiez’s catlike nose as he let the flap close behind him, checking nobody had followed. “I’m not his babysitter. He’s probably out on patrol.”

That was all Felwen needed to know, apparently, because her shoulders quickly fell back into their original relaxed position. Valdiez pulled a burlap sack from behind him, dropping it without much care on the ground. “If you’re gonna stick around,” he’s addressing Oleraco now, “you’re gonna need a weapon. We need all the help we can get. So I…found some things that’re...well, not in use anymore.” Felwen’s stern look returns as the charr chuckles at his own euphemism. He kicks the sack in Oleraco’s direction with a clawed foot. “Take your pick.”

Oleraco has to reach over to grab the sack - it’s heavy, and full of mismatched and unwieldy shapes. He assumes a kneeling position and leans over the top of it, prying it open - and beginning to sort through the assortment of weapons inside. A small handaxe, a few daggers, a pistol, and what looks like...a trinket? Some kind of ornate silver semicircle, with a leather-wrapped bar where Oleraco assumed it was to be held. Valdiez notices when his eyes settle on it for a few seconds. “That’s a focus. We don’t have time to teach you magic, sprout, sorry.”

“He _has _a name.”

“It’s a term of endearment.” Not like Valdiez knew his name anyway.

“Oleraco,” he offers the charr, rifling around in the bag again. A few moments pass before he draws out two pistols - one for each hand. They’re mismatched, but he bounces them a couple of times in his palms to make sure that they’re at least evenly wighted. Not perfect, but they’ll do. Oleraco turned one over to see where he was supposed to put the bullets in, and found nothing. 

“Asuran technology from a few years back made the bullet industry all but obselete,” Valdiez grumbles. “There’s something in there that generates bullets as the gun is fired. Some sort of matter converter, or something. I don’t know. I prefer physical mechanisms - maybe ask Zoilla when she gets back.”

Felwen doesn’t want to overwhelm him with introducing him to everyone at once. That time will come. For now, “Do you need Valdiez to teach you how to use those?”

“No, I think I got it.” Now aware that both of the guns were pretty much always loaded whether he wanted or not, Oleraco took a visibly larger amount of care with them. He hooked both of them onto the belt of the armour he had somehow acquired. 

“I wonder how you know some things, but not others,” Felwen muses aloud. Oleraco doesn’t have the answer to that, but he does have another question.

“Do you exit the Dream knowing everything?”

“Point taken.”

The evening winds down quickly after that. Strange faces who had been on morning patrols return to sleep for the night, seemingly too tired out to question the new addition to their dormitory. Felwen makes periodical conversation with him, but doesn’t ask him any more questions, though he does catch her staring at him sometimes, like he’s something she’s never seen before.

Which, maybe, he is.

Quiet falls inside the tent as its inhabitants fall asleep, and Oleraco hears thrums and chirps of the jungle’s nocturnal citizens start up outside. He makes sure Felwen is definitely asleep before standing up and gingerly exiting the tent, and stands by the entrance for a while, watching the jungle come alive. Despite the lack of sun, with the remnants of which the horizon still burns faintly orange, the bioluminescent plants and the glowing insects hanging in the air like tiny lanterns do plenty to light the way.

Oleraco does not sleep. He sits by the tent and watches the sky and listens to Maguuma's wild orchestra. In the far distance, he hears gunshots, and shouting. Close to him there are just cicadas and crickets and night birds, and...

A rumble. Deep, the deepest sound he's ever heard, and sustained, like an earthquake nobody else is worried about, and it sounds like it's coming from directly beneath him. Like the jungle itself is growling, or maybe purring, or maybe both - either way, he feels almost as though it is calling out to him, and him alone. Getting no sense of direction from the sound, Oleraco stands, aimlessly wondering in search of its source towards the camp's entrance, towards the waiting mouth of the uncontrolled, unsettled jungle. He can feel the sound in his skin, the vibrations of it seeping into his muscles and his bones and his nervous system and eventually, inexorably, his brain, until he feels like his eyes are unfocusing and something that isn't him is controlling his movements.

He doesn’t feel controlled, though. He feels guided, as though something is showing him the light. There’s nothing pushing him along – rather, something has taken his hand and is pulling him forward. He just walks. He passes the camp's boundaries and starts down the sloping path towards a precarious looking rope bridge, looking down at the life-filled valley beneath it. He stops halfway across it, looking up now that he can get a clearer view of the sky, looking for all the world as if it's on fire.

Oleraco can swear he begins to hear words in the rumbling. The realisation stiffens him, turns his joints to stone. He no longer feels guided, or comforted. Something deep within the sound feels malicious, and he feels momentarily like a moth being lured into a fire.

_You...belong...to...me..._

The grumbling stops. Oleraco feels the absence of the vibration beneath his feet, feels the acute silence the jungle has been cast into, before the chirping and rustling and singing gradually fades back into earshot. It takes him a few stunned moments before he thinks to return to the safety of the camp.

Felwen is asleep when he gets back. He feels a few of the inhabitant’s eyes on him as he slips underneath the tent’s flap, settling into the vacant bedroll adjacent to hers, studying her face. She looks content in her sleep. Nobody else in the tent seems at all ruffled, for that matter.

Like nobody else in the world heard what he just heard.


End file.
